Yesterday I was handed a link to the most bizarre pictures I’ve seen in a while: A Hexagonal shape on Saturns surface, roughly the size of four Earths.

The hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows the hexagon extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

That just makes my head spin in bewilderment. Why, in the midst of the sinuous formations of gas, would there appear a shape with straight sides and corners? Moreover, this thing has existed for over 20 years. First spotted by patching together images from Voyager 1 and 2, the spacecraft Cassini has now pictured it again.

I don’t know of any other cornered shape on such a grand scale, at least not such a primitive one. Moving up levels of complexity in the Universe, we get continually curvier lines such as our cloud formations. What we’re seeing are the interactions of a soup of shapes (gas) - I don’t see how they could sustain a global primitive geometric shape like a hexagon for an extended period of time. Totally bizarre.

[via space.com and NASA]